Alissa Kriteman

Louise Lowry

Episode 25: "5 ways to be a More Empowered, Stress-Free Woman!" with Louise Lowry

This interview is a very useful resource for taking control of being stressed out Right Now. We cover a wide variety of "easy to do" methods that you can use in the workplace or at home with no problem. Louise actually walks me through a breathing exercise so you can see how easy it is to do.
We cover a variety of ways we can become more empowered in our lives as stress becomes is ever more prevalent in daily living. Namely:
1) Learn more about yourself
2) Master emotional control
3) Therapeutic breathing
4) Meditation and Yoga Practices
5) EFT, Self - Hypnosis
Louise talks Emotional Freedom Technique, a quick and simple way to reduce stress quickly. (Please listen to my interview with Kate Winch for more detailed information on this great technique as well).
Forget the Mid-Life Crisis, we see how and why stress is affecting people at younger and younger ages causing a condition called "Quarter Life Crisis." Stress is inescapable. Being Pro-active about Self development and understanding Emotional Intelligence seem to be the keys for Millennials suffering from this Quarter-Life Crisis (great article in Common Ground Magazine) to help decrease stress and gain more clarity.
Using courses online (talentsmart.com) to get support and being pro-active about personal growth are recommendations we can use at any age as well. This is part Two of Two Series.
Please email me your comments or post a comment in the JFW Blog. If you really like this interview, go to iTunes and write a 5-star review! Thanks!

Transcript

Louise Lowry, “5 ways to be a More Empowered, Stress-Free Woman!”

Alissa Kriteman: Welcome to Just For Women: Dating, Relationships and Sex. I’m your host, Alissa Kriteman. My show is dedicated to bringing you the most insightful and provocative experts on the issues that are most important to you. Today on our show, I am happy to welcome back Louise Lowry, stress and management consultant, dedicated to helping professional women stay healthy, balanced and empowered. Today on the show we will discuss with Louise some of our coping skills and how to identify them, practical alternative techniques to decreasing stress and a phenomenon called Quarter Life Crisis, what it is and how we deal with it.

Louise Lowry: And breathing is the biggest tool that we have in our body, that if we breathe properly because people think that they are breathing everyday but they’re not breathing properly. But I think for a lot of people what they try to tend to do is they learn something and then they think that once they go for one session that’s the end. It is something that they need to do every single day. Some people, they love them and they work really well for, for others they may not, so that’s why there’s so many different ones out there. There will be one that will suit everybody, but you know, it’s just trying to find that. They graduate from the University and they go into the workplace, and the one thing that they are not prepared for is, is what that workplace offers and, and they’re not trained in how to handle certain things because nowadays most of these kids are young adults now, have been brought up to where that they can, you know, go out there, the world is your oyster, you can what you want, you can handle any situation, but they haven’t really been trained, and when they get to the workplace it’s a bit of a different world.

Alissa Kriteman: They’re called the Millenials, and they’re these young adults who are exactly going through what you’ve coined the Quarter Life Crisis because exactly, they’ve been giving, given so many opportunities they don’t know which direction to go.

Alissa Kriteman: So Louise, lets talk a little bit about, what’s a, what’s one of the first steps in understanding our own personal coping skills?

Louise Lowry: Well the, the first thing anyone needs to do is to learn a lot about themselves, they need to know more about who they are and how they cope with things and how people perceive them, whether in the work place or at home, and learn how to be more aware of how they are around people and around particular situations and how they can manage that, and ways to look at that is a thing called emotional intelligence. So emotional intelligence and they can find any of this information on the internet and they can also buy things that can help them, teach them emotional intelligence, and there’s also assessments and profiling and basically that just looks at the, how they are around people, so it’s all about self awareness and self management and it’s about relationship awareness and relationship management, and once you know all about that and know how you cope with things, you will understand different situations a lot better and if you’re a powerful leader or a woman who is very empowering in the workplace you can see all the different personalities within that workplace and how they can all cope better as a team. So that’s one way of learning more about yourself is first thing that you need to do in learning to cope and other things then is learning how to do therapeutic breathing because that is something you can do very, very quickly and five, ten minutes at work, and breathing is the biggest tool that we have in our body, that if we breathe properly because people think that they are breathing everyday but they’re not breathing properly, and that’s why in certain situations, if you hear when people have a panic attack they talk about, you know, breathe, breathe deeply, you know, and that’s, and even at massage therapy they do exactly the same because it is part of our coping skills and if you can get into certain therapeutic breathing level that’ll cope and bring, bring you balance in your body as well, and there is a knack to it and it takes a little time to do that, but again, you can, you can get anything on the internet that’s, will look at therapeutic breathing.

Alissa Kriteman: Let’s do one right now. So, so say I was in my office and, you know, I get a call, the deadline got pushed back two days, tell me, lets do a therapeutic breathing technique.

Louise Lowry: Well the first, the first thing I would ask you to do is to take a really deep breath and then you need to hold that deep breath, so you would really, big deep breath, a big…

Alissa Kriteman: Into my belly?

Louise Lowry: Right, just from the abdomen area. Really just push that right up, that breath and really, what you want to do is to hold that breath for, for as long as you can and then release it. And, again, release it for as long as you can. Now there is certain things that you can get to help you with this sort of therapeutic breathing, which is music. And there is breathing music that you can breathe to a particular chime and that will help you bring that therapeutic, to a therapeutic breathing level. There is also a thing that you can get on the internet, which is called like Breathe Ease and what that does is that, that has got, if you’re, if you’re sitting at a computer all day and this will allow you, this will come onto your screen and right at the very bottom it actually teaches you how to breathe, and each time all you have to do is look at it and when you look at it, it’ll just keep teaching you how to breathe, so breathe at the level that that’s breathing, and that is one of the most fantastic things that you can get. I mean, I will give you the details where you can get that, you know, at the end of the show, but that is very, very good as a quick technique of breathing. Rather than sitting teaching it, that is something that you can teach yourself and it costs you, you know, it may cost you a couple of dollars to put that on, but it’s certainly longer term, it’s not going to cost you lot of money having to go and teach yourself how to breathe. All those things then is, you know, look at meditation, yoga, all of those types of things really help take the calmness and find that peace within your mind and there are things that you can do at any stage. And there’s numerous other things to do. A quick technique is called Emotional Freedom Technique, which is the tapping into the meridian points and there’s things, again, you can go onto the Emotional Freedom Technique website and they can show you how to, to be able to do that. But they are quick and easy techniques that you can use straight away to, to start being able to cope a lot better.

Alissa Kriteman: You know, I love that. I actually had an interview with Kate Winch, whose an EFT practitioner on the show, and she was telling us the benefits. It’s, it looks like EFT is really catching on because it’s so easy, you don’t need anybody else, you just have to practice saying what you’re releasing and then calling in what you’re wanting to, you know, bring into your awareness, your mind, your thoughts and it’s relatively easy, you can do it right there at your desk. So this is one of your alternative methods you would recommend?

Louise Lowry: Yes, absolutely because it’s a quick and it’s easy one to learn as well. But I think for a lot of people what they try to tend to do is they learn something and then they think that once they go for one session that’s the end. It is something that they need to do every single day. And my sort of motto, what I do is that I’ve always taken ten minutes out every three hours to actually breathe properly and you don’t have to, you can do that in your car, you can do that in the restaurant, you can do it wherever, people don’t need to see you, you can, and with these sort of techniques that go on now for helping you breathe, they really bring the anxiety level down, they really help you and you, the one thing you will get is a massive difference. The one thing that EFT, that I have noticed which is really fantastic at, is if you are a woman that has to get up to do quite a lot of presentations at workplace and you come very nervous. Remember nervousness and excitement are exactly the same feeling, they’re exactly the same response on the boulder and just before you’re about to go up and present start tapping onto those meridian points and, and repeating the affirmations that they ask you to do and you will see an instant, instant anxiety release there, and once you get up and take your first couple of words that’s you, they probably will have to shoot you to get you off the stage. But it happens, I’ve seen that quite a lot. So it, it’s a very, very good technique to use, along with many, many other benefits, but like all of these types of techniques it will, some people, they love them and they work really well for, for others they may not, so that’s why there’s so many different ones out there. There will be one that will suit everybody, but you know, it’s just trying to find that. So with my job as a consultant, I would have many, many tools in my toolbox that help people, same way as a mechanic, you know. They have plenty of things in their toolbox to help what’s wrong with your car when the breaks dying, so I have the same thing when it happens to break down in your body, stress. I have my toolbox so that I can pull out any of these therapy techniques to help people.

Alissa Kriteman: I love it too. I could see that being really powerful in our relationships, you know, and with our children when, like you said, stress levels get really high in the home, you can still use these breathing techniques at home. I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of empowered women in the workplace, there’s a lot of empowered women at home as well and this little tapping technique sounds really well. Do you have another one that you’d recommend?

Louise Lowry: The other one I would recommend, I would highly recommend self hypnosis, which is part of the hypnotherapy end of it, but people don’t realize they can actually hypnotize themselves because we do that anyway, we’re always in a trance, and that’s just what self, self hypnosis is, and, you know, once, once you learn how to do that, again, that’s a very, very good technique to use for yourself to be able to sleep better, concentrate better, focus a lot better and bring a lot of balance into your life. So that’s another very good technique to, to certainly look at. There’s a lot of complicated techniques out there, but what I’m trying to do is give you the very simple ones, the ones that won’t cost a lot of money and certainly can have benefits straight away.

Alissa Kriteman: That’s why you’re here. I love Louise. Okay, before, we have to go soon, I can’t believe our time is running out, but we have to talk about this Quarter Life Crisis that’s coming up and, so we’re very familiar with midlife crisis, happens somewhere in our mid to late 30’s. What is this Quarter Life Crisis?

Louise Lowry: The Quarter Life Crisis, it’s always been around, it’s just something that’s a new phase that’s coined back in the late 90’s. But basically it happens in around about the age of 21 to 29 and the main sort of basis of this particular crisis is when the kids of today, they’re not really kids, they’re young adults, when they leave to go to Universities or colleges and they have had for most of middle-class America, they’ve had this great upbringing and money, there was no option to them. They have gone to the Universities, they have decided what they want to be, whether that’s a lawyer or a doctor or a business person, whatever they have decided to be, and then all of a sudden they have become, they graduate from the University and they go into the workplace and the one thing that they are not prepared for is, is what that workplace offers and they are not trained at height to handle certain things because nowadays most of these kids are young adults now, have been brought up to where that they can, you know, go out there, the world is your oyster, you can do what you want, you can handle any situation, but they haven’t really been trained, and when they get to the workplace it’s a bit of a different world. You know, downsizing, restructuring happens, they start to, they start to question whether they have gone to the right roots of their education, whether they really wanted to be a lawyer or they really wanted to be a doctor, and they question that, and also because of the money situation some of them end up having to move back home with their parents and that causes a lot of frustration, and they miss their college friends and they miss the life of college and they miss all of that, whereas now they are told they’re now responsible for their own lives and they’re responsible for this and they can’t cope with it. And they really can’t cope with that responsibility in the workplace, and that’s, you know, to them it’s unfair on them because they really haven’t been trained how to do it and the Universities don’t train things, and if they trained emotional intelligence in schools I think they would alleviate quite a lot of that problem.

Alissa Kriteman: So, it’s interesting because I read an article recently in Common Ground magazine that talked exactly about this. They called the Millenials, and they’re these young adults who are exactly going through what you’ve coined the Quarter Life Crisis because, exactly, they’ve been giving, given so many opportunities, they don’t know which direction to go. So, if there are listeners on the show who, you know, they’re, they’re computer savvy, they have grown up with technology, so podcasting is definitely something that they’re going to be more open to. So what would you say to these young millenials who might be going through this Quarter Life Crisis, what’s something, some things that they can do to help get some direction and focus and not be so stressed out about what they’re going to do with their life?

Louise Lowry: Well they can do any of the techniques, again, that we just discussed, but the one thing I would ask them to do is look at emotional intelligence. The one thing they all, most of them have, not all of them, but most of them have will be the IQ levels because they’ve come from University, they’ve graduated, some of them have graduated with honors degrees, etcetera, and, but the IQ gets you the job and it teaches you how to do that job, but what it doesn’t teach you is how to manage yourself and how to manage other people. So emotional intelligence is an absolute fantastic thing for these young adults to look at, and because they’re computer savvy there’s so many of those emotional intelligence, you can actually do the whole course online, and it’s a very, very simple course, so there’s a place called Talent Smart that, that offer all of those particular profiling on our lives and to look at the full emotional intelligence part and they will learn a lot from that. And I would also encourage them to look and ask their bosses for more help in developing especially their leadership and go to them and tell, you know, what they’re going to get is a real, more rounded, more balanced person ready to, to accept all the responsibilities and for them to help send you on maybe even some of these particular courses, but there’s many, many things out there to help them. As I said, the things that we discussed earlier are just techniques but definitely I would a hundred and fifty percent advise them to look at emotional intelligence.

Alissa Kriteman: I like that and I like them co-creating with their employers, that is not something that we were encouraged to do. You know, you have that job and that was your job. And so, finally as, as we end, is there any guidance you would give to women specifically?

Louise Lowry: Well, the real guidance is that because at the moment more women are out in the leadership field and they are empowering a lot more people out there and a lot more men, the real advice I would give to these women is just do not ignore your emotional management. Make sure that you are able to release that so that you can continue to be that powerful leader and don’t be hard-hearted person ‘cause you don’t need to be that because women of power, and especially women of power who are very balanced and very approachable, are the people that are going to be the leaderships, leadership people of tomorrow, and those that are harder are going to find that eventually that stress is going to get to them, and if it doesn’t get to them it’s going to get to their family, you know and, you know, it happens. So my advice is, you know, for anyone really is make sure you’re self, you’re doing self-development, don’t just depend on your company to develop you, do it yourself because self-development, it’s a cheap way of doing things and especially with internet and the wide variety of things that are available there and the information available. There is no excuse for anyone not to be able to develop. And that’s advice I would give any woman. You know, empower yourself, develop yourself, give yourself the voice, don’t wait for someone else to do it and get onto that big World Wide Web and get that information, and I wish you good luck and obviously they can get in contact with me if they really do need some more advice.

Alissa Kriteman: When I first saw her website it’s kind of, it’s interesting because it’s one, o-n-e, the number 2, but then it’s the letter x and the letter l, so I just wanted to be clear about that so people can find you, one2xl.com and what about emailing you?

Louise Lowry: Yes they can email me [email protected] and I’d be happy to answer any questions that they may have and put them in the right direction should they have any issues that they need to resolve as quickly as possible.

Alissa Kriteman: Okay, and then you talked about Talent Smart as one of the emotional intelligence supports that we can find and then you were going to tell us about Breath Ease, that sounds great, the little thing that comes on the computer. How can we find that?

Louise Lowry: Yeah, I’ll have to just give you the details of that at the end of the show. I need to give you the full details, which you can possibly put on to your, or I can put it on, to anybody that wants it I will be able to give them that information, I just don’t have it here, but it’s a very, very great wee thing to have on your computer to help you breathe.

Alissa Kriteman: We’ll probably Google it faster than we can get the information to people. Just Google Breath Ease. Louise thank you so much for being on Just For Women. It was a pleasure to have you and Amen on all of the, you know, what you said at the end there about women empowering themselves. There are many, many tools not only on the internet but also live programs and, you know, just to do a plug for some of the other people that I’ve interviewed like Alexis Shepard and Shayna Weinstein of The Authentic Woman Experience, that a is very, very powerful live course for women to take, to help let go of a lot of the emotional buildup that happens with women. Allison Armstrong as well, huge pioneer for women understanding themselves and men, so thank you Louise for being our stress relief expert today. So great to have you. Listeners I just want you to know that you can email me at [email protected]. Please give me your comments about the show, ask questions, offer any ideas, I would love, love, love to hear from you, and also text and transcripts of the show are available at personallifemedia.com. And that brings us to the end of the show. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’m your host Alissa Kriteman, always empowering you to make the best choices so you can live the life of your dreams, here on Just For Women: Dating, Relationships and Sex. See you next time.